Inferno - Max Hastings [319]
The only answer, the Nazis concluded, was to reduce provision for native inhabitants of the occupied territories and Russian POWs. On 13 November, Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told his heads of department that “prisoners of war who are not working will have to starve.” Thus Russian prisoners began to die in vast numbers, some of hunger and others at the hands of guards granted unlimited licence to kill to control the herds of desperate humanity for which they were responsible. By 1 February 1942, almost 60 percent of 3.35 million Soviet prisoners in German hands had perished; by 1945, 3.3 million were dead out of 5.7 million taken captive.
Only in 1943 did the Nazis acknowledge that hungry mouths also had useful hands: they belatedly accepted the value, indeed indispensability, of keeping prisoners alive to bolster Germany’s shrinking industrial labour force. When this new policy was implemented, Göring observed with complacency that Russians performed 80 percent of the construction work on his Ju-87 Stukas. By the autumn of 1944, almost 8 million foreign labourers and POWs were engaged in the German economy, 20 percent of its workforce. BMW employed 16,600 prisoners at its Munich plant alone; though still treated with institutionalised cruelty, their rations were increased just sufficiently to sustain life. Industrial employers asked that punishments should be administered behind the wire of workers’ quarters, rather than in open view on factory premises, to avoid distressing German staff. A vast complex of guarded quarters was established in and around every major German city to house foreigners of all kinds. The Munich area harboured 120 POW facilities, 286 barracks and hostels for civilians and a brothel to service them, together with 7 concentration camp outstations including a branch of Dachau, a total of 80,000 bedspaces.
It was impossible for most German civilians to credibly deny knowledge of the concentration camps or the slave-labour system: little girls living near Ravensbrück were seen playing a game of “camp guards”; prisoners were widely used for firefighting, rescue work and clearing rubble in the wake of air raids. They were also dispatched to deal with unexploded bombs, a task so often fatal that SS men convicted of crimes were preferred as guards for such squads. To ensure that slaves were readily available, local satellite camps were established in urban areas. Prisoners from Sachsenhausen, for instance, were drafted into nearby Berlin, where their striped clothing caused civilians to refer to them as “zebras.” In Osnabrück, mothers complained to the SS that children in the schoolyard were obliged to witness slaves being beaten by their guards. The SS responded that “if the children aren’t tough enough yet, they have to be hardened.”
Local authorities were generally appreciative of such cheap labour, which the mayor of Duisburg described as “highly satisfactory.” But some civilians deplored alleged coddling: a road contractor wrote in March 1944, “We are still much too soft on POWs and other labour squads in our streets. I say, better throw one man overboard than let us drown.” The SS frequently used prisoners to collect loot from wrecked buildings for their own profit—in Düsseldorf two men were shot lest they reveal their jailers’ racketeering. Civilian doctors frequently signed false